How far can a gun bullet travel?

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I know obviously it depends on the make of gun and bullet. I know shooting it into the air it comes down faster and therefore strikes and at times kills but I was thinking MINUS any wall/obstacle how long can a bullet travel just through air?

About 2 miles. People can actually hit targets at 1 mile.

Myth Busters did a show on the bullets fired into the air issue, and found that bullets shot straight up tumble, because they stop at the top and lose their spin, so they come down a lot slower, and are not lethal. Bullets shot at an angle into the air keep their spin and stay lethal for the entire trajectory.

Straight up, it doesn't come down any faster until it starts getting close to terminal velocity and gravity pulls it back down. It won't kill you. It only kills when it's not straight up, so the projectile still flies on a ballistic trajectory.

A .22LR from a rifle (least powerful common firearm for the most part), can travel a couple of thousand meters (it can penetrate a human skull out to several hundred). Pistols are around this as they usually fire less aerodynamically stable projectiles compared to centerfire rifle rounds.

Centerfire rifles, a few to several kilometers at the most efficient angle for range (45).

Far.

If you box the ammo, and ship it to Diego Garcia from the US, about 12,500 miles or so...

About shooting a bullet straight up, if there was no air, it would come down with exactly the same speed it left the barrel with. A certain amount of kinetic energy (magnitude A) goes into the bullet; as the bullet moves higher this becomes potential energy. When it reaches the highest point it has potential energy equal to the kinetic energy it started with (also magnitude A). As it falls this is converted back to kinetic energy, and when the bullet reaches ground level again all the potential energy has been converted back to kinetic energy, so it would reach the ground at exactly the same speed it left.

In practice, air resistance slows it down, so it reaches a high point with less than A energy left, and is slowed down further on the way down. Tumbling and so on increase the air resistance, which slows it further, but so long as the gun is not fired in a vacuum the bullet will always land slower than it is fired, even if it doesn't tumble at all.

Though that range equation doesn't take air resistance into account, in practice the optimum range will be achieved with an angle somewhere near 45 degrees, depending on the gun in question.

There's a long history of people trying to fire projectiles into orbit - the aforementioned Gerald Bull who designed the supergun and who was subsequently assassinated by Mossad (*ahem* probably by Mossad) was the lead engineer of one of them, HARP, before he went to work for Saddam.

Other people have provided better answers than me on this, but I'd like to point out the range of a bullet is dependant upon the caliber of the bullet as well the length and rifle twist on the barrel as well as the size of the charge firing the bullet.

A 'hot load' cartridge will fire bullet further than either a cold load or standard load. Furthermore, a longer barrel will translate to a higher muzzle velocity as the bullet clears the barrel, which again translates to increased range over a gun of the same caliber shooting the same load but with a shorter barrel.

Also, for what it's worth, a rifle shooting a .50 BMG will have accurate lethality within a range of two miles, further than that, the bullet will still be lethal, but with increasing inaccuracy for another 2 miles or so.

A tad off maybe but when my physics teach (+/- 25 years ago) told us/me that when one fires a gun perfectly horizontal and at the exact same time drops a bullet at the same height the other bullet leaves the barrel, (if the earth's surface was flat, no wind.... ), BOTH hit the ground at the same time.

At the time I could hardly believe this but in that ideal situation it would.... for Newton (nasty fellow btw) would pull both towards the surface with the same force. I.e. gravity.

But yeah anyway, it depends of course.... the angle of the barrel, the begin speed of the bullet, the thickness of the bullet (caliber), wind direction and other variables I'm forgetting here. No easy or simple answer thus.